“Trifecta,” said my friend Becky on the phone, although she lives in Colorado; if there’s a racetrack around here, it’s news to me.

“Trifecta what?” I asked her.

“I just got home from a job interview where they asked me not one, not two, but all three of the idiotic job interview questions you’re always railing about.”

“All three?” I asked her. “That’s amazing. Were these people otherwise reasonable, or was the place a petri dish full of amoebas?”
“Amoebae, I think,” said Becky. “I think ‘amoebae’ is the plural for ‘amoeba.'”

“Either way, what were these people like?” I pressed her. “Toads,” she said. “I almost didn’t go to the interview at all, because the recruiter who set up the appointment said ‘Don’t be late’ to me before she hung up. I knew then and there that I didn’t want to work with these people, but like you always say, it’s good to go on the interview and get more practice.”

“And grow your mojo,” I added. “Oh, brother!” said Becky. “This was the world’s most slam-dunk mojo-growth interview, let me tell you. As horrible as it was to talk with the toad people, it is nice to remember that I have something valuable to offer, too. It was nice to walk out of there thinking ‘If I live to be a million years old, I’ll never work for people like that.'”

Oh geez, I thought as I answered my office phone, first thing this morning. A PR call at eight a.m.? The young man on the phone was trying to sell me on writing a column about his company’s career-path-calculating software. This was not the call I would have picked to start my day, but the universe is in charge, not me, so I gritted my teeth and stuck with it.

“You know,” I said, “I’m not a fan of instruments and assessments that purport to tell people what they should do for a living.” The young man halted in his pitchman’s spiel. “What?” he asked. “Don’t you think an instrument like ours will do a better job of picking a person’s career path than the person will do, himself?”

“I think that may appear to be true,” I said, “only because it is very hard for most of us (perhaps all of us) to get outside ourselves enough to have a clear perspective on our own situations. However, our friends do a great job of telling us what we’re good at and where we shine. When we can take time to listen to our creative right brains and our bodies, listen to our friends and think about where we’re happiest at work, we can pick perfectly wonderful career paths. I don’t trust any algorithm to do that work. That’s about as human a task as we could imagine. Why would we entrust it to an equation?” Read more…

I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, thinking about MBAs and job hunting. I have a soft spot for folks in full-time graduate programs, because it’s hard to spend two years with your brain split down the middle. When you go back to school to improve your career-type marketability, you have to study hard in order to get good grades and learn everything you can. You’re expected to be focused on your studies. At the same time, you’ve got to keep one eye on the horizon — on your post-graduation job search, that is – which can be unnerving, since the full-time program doesn’t allow you to do lots of things that you’d do if you were actively job-hunting right now. Read more…

I’m sure the guy is dead now, whoever he was, but I have a major bone to pick with whoever invented resumes. What a horrible idea! Who could expect us to get twenty, thirty or sixty years of awesome life and work experience across in a two-page document? The idea of a resume itself is what my sporty friends would call a non-starter.

On top of the sucktastic two-page resume format, we’ve got other obstacles in our way when we try to get across our power and heft on the job hunt. Most of us have been taught to write our resumes in a style we could only call Corporate Zombiespeak. It’s the worst. We’re taught to describe ourselves as Results-Oriented Professionals and Motivated Self-Starters, whatever the heck those awful terms mean. We’re taught to talk about our Skills and Competencies.Read more…

Cassandra had been looking for a job for three or four months when she chatted with me after a presentation I gave on new-millennium job hunting. “I had the most upsetting experience recently,” she said. “I interviewed for a Marketing job, and I had every qualification listed in the ad. I could tell, though, that I was losing the two interviewers during the interviews. I couldn’t keep their attention.”

“Who were these guys?” I asked her. “They’re two founders who started an agency together,” she said. “I got about fifty minutes with the first one and then maybe thirty-five with the second guy. The conversations were just off, a little. I was trying to talk about my experience, and I couldn’t get them excited about anything.” Inwardly I grimaced.Read more…

It’s way too warm in Colorado to start thinking about Christmas — our bodies rebel at the idea of hanging holiday lights when it’s sixty degrees outside, or at least mine does. Still, we have no choice. The holidays are right on top of us. That means that we’re about to head into the Sticky Season at work, and I’m not talking about the vats of vendor-sent caramel corn filling up breakrooms across America.

The holidays are sticky at work because they remind us of the tectonic plates that we navigate every day at the juncture of work and life. Holidays are about life and the passing of seasons, and celebration and ritual and color and family. Work, for the most part (unless you’ve got an awesome job that I’m sure Denver Post readers are dying to hear about!) is not. Work is spreadsheet-y, analytical, black and white and crisp, with square corners. Holidays are buoyant and joyous and personal and emotional. It’s not always easy to balance the two energies at this time of year.

I wrote my first Pain letter after reading your article about Pain letters last week. Hurrah! I got a call from the hiring manager the next day. I have an interview set up for next week.

Now I am avid to write a bunch more Pain letters, but I am curious. When the hiring manager called me to set up the interview for next week, I had already sent in a standard cover letter with my resume, weeks ago. I never heard anything back. Why did the hiring manager respond to my Pain letter so quickly, after ignoring my earlier application?

“I don’t get it,” says my son, a high school freshman. “You’re supposed to pick a college based on what you want to study. You’re supposed to study something that you might want to do for a career. How would you know? You apply to college when you’re seventeen. How could you make that decision then, when you haven’t done that kind of work before?”

The kid is wise, and so are all the kids who ask the same sensible question. The school-to-career chain in our country is badly broken, if there can be said to be any such chain at all. In the high school my kids attend, the students get a cursory career unit in tenth grade Health class. When my daughter took that course a few years ago, I asked her how the process worked. “We take a test,” she said, “and it tells us what we should do professionally.” Read more…

A lady called me to get a quote for a story. She was writing a story about job-search tips. I gave her a tip (I think it was about salary negotiation) and when the story came out, the lady who wrote the story sent me the link. As I read through the job-search tips, I got depressed. A lot of them were awful, “here are new ways to grovel” tips, but one bit of advice really stood out. “Since lots of employers won’t hire people who are unemployed,” this advice-giver began, “don’t indicate on your LinkedIn profile if you’re out of work.”

Let’s break this horrendous advice down. First off, do you think a person is going to make it through the whole interview process without having to share the news that he or she isn’t working? Isn’t that going to emerge sooner rather than later, like when the recruiter at this unemployed-people-hating company asks, “So, are you still working at Domino’s Pizza?” Are you going to lie, at that point? Is that what the job-search-advice-giver is recommending that a job-seeker in that situation do? Read more…

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